Passing It Forward: Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk

In this moment of racial reckoning throughout the united States, how are the voices of older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals being captured and stored? While large collections of archives exist curating LGBTQ+ local, regional, and national artifacts, far too few of those collections are digitized, fewer are one-on-one interviews (where respondents are allowed to be heard in their own words), and even fewer are one-on-one interviews with older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals. This project—Passing It Forward—seeks to fill that gap by conducting 150 one-on-one interviews, via Zoom, from January 2021 thru June 2021, with this very unique population. The interview protocol gathered information about the respondents’ background, professional and political activism, as well as their insights on prescribing a more inclusive future for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and their intersections.

Within this collection of papers, some of the undergraduate and graduate students who collected the data then wrote these articles exploring a plethora of research questions. Because the researchers tended to be one— or two, and sometimes three—generations younger than the person they interviewed, this project will provide a venue to allow these changemakers to educate and inspire.

So then, how do racial and sexual orientation identity enhance or inhibit the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) changemakers? For this target population, three specific areas were investigated:

(a) their personal life history; (b) their ‘activism’ life histories, and how their personal life histories are interconnected with their activism life histories; (c) their perspectives on current topics versus historical ones; for example, what are the similarities and differences between the resources and responses to Covid-19 in 2020 versus HIV/AIDS in the 1980s?

Simmel (1955), a pioneer in research on identities, developed the idea of “crosscutting social circles.” Blau & Schwartz (1984) expanded Simmel’s work and argued that membership in multiple identity-based groups could be a positive attribute (allowing access to more people) or a negative one (when differences are consolidated). Early work on how individuals navigate the space between means, goals, and social structure (see Merton 1949/1968) highlights the ongoing struggle between changing identities and cultural expectations.

Though multiple roles can create opportunities (Coser 1975 & 1991; Lifton 1993); other researchers—primarily Black feminists—have argued that multiple roles can serve as interlocking systems of oppression (Collins 1990 & 2003; Crenshaw 1989 & 1991). Subsequently, a new generation of scholars have expanded upon the work of these feminists and have explored the “intersectional imagination,” a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individual-and group-level oppressions based on identity (Pastrana, 2006) and their interaction with social structures. More recently, scholars have applied these theories to transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies (Patil, 2013).

Central to producing as well as impacting research, policy, and evidencebased knowledge is examining how issues that affect the broader population of people in the U.S. (i.e. healthcare, language proficiency, immigration, and reproductive health—just to name a few) continue to disproportionately affect populations who live at the intersection of non-normative identities, like people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender populations.

In sum, longstanding and central to research being conducted by sociologists are issues of identity—including racial (Frazier 1939), sexuality (Foucault 1990), and their intersections (Collins 1990 & 2004; Crenshaw 1989).

Documenting and dissecting those identities can be uniquely done via video archives of one-on-one interviews. The interview structure notwithstanding, in terms of archives focusing on LGBTQ+ populations, one of the largest collections located at a university is the one at the University of Southern California. As their website boasts:

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world.

Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records and personal papers.

However, unfortunately, only a small subset of this material has...